A stray Facebook post by Bill Blattner finishing his History of Modern Philosophy course got me thinking: why not a stoner movie set in an HMP course? The stoner movie -- from Cheech & Chong and Bill & Ted through Harold & Kumar and let's not forget Anna Faris in Smiley Face! -- is an establishe...

Did you even read the post, Madison, or did you just fixate your attention on a single word? I did not equate Sarko to Mussolini, I suggested that they had similar political tactics, and I was quite specific about what those tactics were. Moreover, I'm not the only one to have made such a comparison (I'm hardly original): the French commentariat has done it, Jean-Marie LePen (leader of the extreme right) has done it, Gianfranco Fini (the Italian neo-Fascist and ex-ally of Berlusconi) has done it--and both LePen and Fini meant the comparison positively. It's a matter of historical fact that Mussolini sent his thugs to popular demonstrations to incite violence and thus discredit leftist movements and reinforce his image as a defender of law and order; it's not much of a stretch, and certainly not ridiculous, to say that Sarko engages in similar tactics. On another note, you seem to have missed at least three instances where I said that politicians on both the left and the right acknowledge that the system is in desperate need of reform and that something needs to be done;there's a difference of opinion as to how to fix the system, but everyone recognizes that the system does indeed need to be fixed, and that the fix won't be easy. Before one reacts to a blog post with admonishment and ad hominem, it might be wise for one to read and understand the post more carefully.

By now everyone has heard that various sectors of France’s working class are, once again, on strike, and that there have been several large-scale demonstrations and other smaller-scale but perhaps more effective strike actions for the last six weeks. The last week or so has witnessed a series o...

let me quickly add that prior to posting this, i forgot to enclose two different half-sentences in citation marks and credit them to an article published Tuesday October 9 by Bruce Crumley on Time.com, "French Strikes Escalate as Sarkozy Remains Defiant." One is a close paraphrase of "to erase the pension-fund deficits of $13 billion, which are set to bulge to $123 billion by 2050," which appears in the second paragraph; the other is a near exact quoting of "a rival Socialist proposal calls for financing it through new taxes on capital gains, profits and bonuses in the financial sector" in the sixth paragraph.

By now everyone has heard that various sectors of France’s working class are, once again, on strike, and that there have been several large-scale demonstrations and other smaller-scale but perhaps more effective strike actions for the last six weeks. The last week or so has witnessed a series o...

By now everyone has heard that various sectors of France’s working class are, once again, on strike, and that there have been several large-scale demonstrations and other smaller-scale but perhaps more effective strike actions for the last six weeks. The last week or so has witnessed a series of headlines... Continue reading